


Wreckage

by aderyn



Series: Deep Map [16]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Episode: s01e03 The Great Game, Explosions, Retirement, there's smoke, where there's fire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-16
Updated: 2013-02-16
Packaged: 2017-11-29 10:33:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/685949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dust settles.<br/>That’s what it does.</p>
<p>Shall we retire  together, then?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wreckage

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [fennishjournal](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Shimi/pseuds/fennishjournal) for inspirational conversation,[Professorfangirl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lizeckhart/pseuds/professorfangirl) for knowing it with the body, and [stitching](http://archiveofourown.org/users/stitchingatthecircuitboard/pseuds/stitchingatthecircuitboard) and [Moranion](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Moranion/pseuds/Moranion) always, for fire.

 

They don’t explode on contact.

They don’t combust.

“Damn,” young Sherlock says.

Adds more permanganate.

Grows up.

*****

All the bombs have fallen on his city, and more will.

Bethnal Green, Aldgate, Edgeware,the flaming petrol of Tottenham and the guns of Brixton; this is his London, this wreck of remembrance; he knows it, feels it in the body he won’t own, this hot coursing, this buildup, these veins about to blow.

*****

You can’t blog a bomb. Or no, you can; that’s the whole point. Incendiary. The words before the shock, the concussion, the smoke.

These things that decompose and rearrange--John knows them,the PE4, the Semtex, the Sherlock, all buildup and aftermath and calcium and copper and the blue and the gold of the fist-forged fire.

*****

“Arsonists and bombers have a lot in common,” Sherlock says, ticks them off on his fingers,“but not as much as you’d think.”

_The British Journal of Criminology_ , dog-eared, this “ _model of fire-setting actions_ …” on tilt, his hands stained with something red, his fingers unlickable.

*****

“Yours’ll be the last face I see,” John says in a tight spot, “I’m fine with that.”

They think they won’t make it out but they do, blackened, burnt, bloodied not buried, bathed in the shadow and light of a crime scene, falling.

That’s what dust does. It settles.

There’s ash in Sherlock’s hair. It looks grey.

Ash in John’s looks white.

*****

Later, Sherlock says,

“I was good.”

_I’m fine with that too._

Later, Sherlock says,

“Shall we retire together then?”

John might at one time have laughed, blown it off, but now his lids twitch and his lips twitch and the question’s as rhetorical, as _not needing,_ as the fall of a spark.

*****

They don’t explode on contact but it’s sort of surprising.

That they didn’t.  

*****

Pool.

Windows.

Strapped.

Don’t forget how your heart went dark, oxidised, seeing that.

Don’t forget.

*****

Your hair’s a wreck. Your body’s a wreck. Your old injuries flare and your small hurts build and--

“That you’ll always have,” says Sherlock, wondering at the scar. The impacts he sees in it. The aftershocks.

“Yeah,” John says, and that’s all, but to trace the burn on Sherlock’s bicep, say “healing well,” fan another reaction out of the kitchen, fling open the windows, throw back your head for the joy of it, for having survived.

*****

We’re judged (John thinks) not just by the things we live through, but by the things we don’t, the places where we stop, where we rest, where we leave the fine particulates of ourselves--that hospital in Helmand, that rooftop, that hospital.

*****

“John,” Sherlock says, flattening the blueprints that make a house, a home, one day a grave, “look at this.”

Earth opens. There is such a joy in it.

Dust settles.

That’s what it does.

As seeds do, as the fire-climax plant, the gorse, whose bloom dictates kissing, whose scent’s detectable with the right gene, whose wire harbours warblers, stonechats, the shy concealer moth, its pods consumed and opened by fire.

It carpets the rubble of London with gold.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> [Wildfires in Britain](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2120988/Blazing-hot-Britain-As-temperatures-soar-parched-countryside-catching-fire.html#axzz2Kfbl5wzO)   
> [ Britain bursts into flames](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthcomment/geoffrey-lean/8499192/Forest-fires-Britain-bursts-into-flames.html)   
> [Tottenham riots](http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/06/tottenham-riots-protesters-police)   
> [Gorse](http://botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/g/gorgol31.html)   
> [Concealer moths](http://bugguide.net/node/view/123)
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> “Altogether elsewhere, vast  
> Herds of reindeer move across  
> Miles and miles of golden moss,  
> Silently and very fast.”—W.H. Auden, “The Fall of Rome”


End file.
